Long before anti-MILO rioters sparked violence at UC Berkeley, a University of Chicago professor named Allan Bloom lit academia ablaze with this 1987 classic taking the professoriate to task for eroding higher education curriculum with progressive pablum. A staunch defender of the classical “canon” of great works every thinking person must read, Bloom explained how the intellectual corruption of the humanities and arts led to an erasure of students’ understanding of the proper moral order that undergirds Western Civilization. A study conducted a few years ago shows that radicals rule at University of California. The California Association of Scholars, a division of the National Association of Scholars, have just released an incendiary report showing that all nine of the University of California’s campuses have been compromised by too many politicized courses and radical faculty members. CAS members include a number of current or past professors from the UC system who have taught at UC-Berkeley, UCLA, UC-Santa Cruz, and UC-San Diego.
Resident conservative Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post compared the 25th anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom’s groundbreaking The Closing of the American Mind to the release of the new CAS report. She astutely pointed out that, “…the left systematically has dumbed its side down, to the point where supposedly well-educated elites are untrained and unaware of our country’s history and constitutional traditions.”
Well, conservatives have long complained of a strong liberal bias in college classrooms, and this new study shows just how far off track it has gone in one of the most prestigious public university systems in the country. The harsh conslusions drawn by American journalist Dan Gagliasso defines this situation as a preocupation that is going to take courage, intelligence, and a lot of hard work, and it’s not going to happen overnight. Take a long look at this new California Association of Scholars study and vet it yourself. Look things up, ask questions and talk with your kids, other students, other parents and family members, and don’t be afraid of the far left’s intellectual elite. Common sense is a lot more important than Marxist indoctrination even at a place like the University of California.
